Acts 2:9-11

9-11. To give a view of the above-expressed universality, Luke now spreads out a map of Israel’s wide dispersion. And Israel’s dispersion is the type of the Babel dispersion of the race, inasmuch as these Pentecostally-gathered sons of the dispersion are here to represent all nations.

Luke’s survey commences with the far east. Parthia, Media, and the Elamites embrace areas of the old Persian empire, where Shalmanezer, king of Assyria, settled the ten tribes at the first captivity. Westward thence is Mesopotamia, (note on Acts 7:2,) whence came ancestral Abraham, and where Nebuchadnezzar settled the victims of the captivity. Luke’s western progress brings him home to Judea. Turning to the north-west, he ranges through five of the provinces of Asia Minor. By a sudden southern descent he arrives at Egypt, the seat of the old Pharaonic captivity, where large numbers of Jews, especially under the first patronage of Alexander the Great, had settled and flourished. Rome represents Europe. The strangers are the residents there of Abrahamic faith, whether Jews by birth or proselyte. The regular plan of his map then seems finished, but he adds the Cretes and Arabians as a supplement too important to be omitted.

Why in this catalogue of countries, whose natives wondered to hear their dialects here spoken, Judea should be enumerated, is an unsettled question among commentators. The manuscripts admit no doubt of the true reading. The opinion of Alford, that it is named because it lay in Luke’s route westward; of Olshausen, because Luke speaks from his stand-point at Rome; of Bengel, Meyer, and others, because the dialect of Galilee was different from Judea, are all rejected by Dr. Gloag, who agrees with Hackett, that it was because Luke would enumerate all the dialects spoken. But what Luke is really enumerating is (Acts 2:8) the countries of those who wondered to hear their dialect spoken by Galileans in Judea. This could, apparently, have been surprising to a Judean solely because the Galilean dialect was different from the Judean. But by our view of the nature of the miracle the difficulty disappears. That from the utterance of the same speaker one should hear Persic, another Coptic, and another Hebrew or Aramaic, would be as wonderful to the Judean as to the Persian.